After years of living in a food desert and having to travel miles away for food, residents in North Flint, Michigan, can shop for fresh produce and groceries while supporting members of the predominantly Black community, thanks to the recently opened North Flint Food Market Cooperative.
The North Flint Food Market Cooperative (NFFM) is Flint’s first cooperative grocery. Unlike traditional grocery stores, which are run by corporations, NFFM is a co-op owned by approximately 900 community members who have invested in the store.
“For over a decade, we wandered in the wilderness hoping for what many communities take for granted: access to healthy food, job and career opportunities, and business ownership and control of one’s destiny,” Rev. Dr. Reginald Flynn, the co-owner and executive director of North Flint Food Market, told WNEM.
“We’ve had a food desert,” Board President Brigitte Brown Jackson added. “Kroger’s left. Meijer’s left this side of town. So, the Clio Pierson Road corridor has not had the functionality we needed to have for our people.”
This is awesome, especially since capitalism is just going to drive more and more receding by businesses, as areas grow poorer and/or less in-line with the corporation’s preferred shopper demos (read: middle-class and white).
The only model for small communities that aren’t good “investments” for businesses (i.e. too little juice left to squeeze) is to stop relying on those businesses to provide for them. Co-ops of local producers and municipal services is the way out of our exploitative morass.